


come to seem the natural course of things

by forsyte



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Character Study, Gen, Light Angst, Loss of Identity, Season/Series 04, briefly and ambiguously helen / melanie flavored
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-04
Updated: 2020-04-04
Packaged: 2021-02-28 22:35:24
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,211
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23474755
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/forsyte/pseuds/forsyte
Summary: She stares, caught off-guard, and the thing in the mirror looks back at her patiently. Her reflection does not move or breathe. She has no need for air, now. If the old man looked back he would see her resplendent in her inhumanity.The old man does not look back. He toils on, doggedly, sweating. The thrumming of his heart as heard by the walls reaches her ears as hymn and metronome. He does not need to see to be afraid.--A person* named Helen Richardson walks through a door.*Conditions may apply.
Comments: 22
Kudos: 41





	come to seem the natural course of things

**Author's Note:**

> _and you,_
> 
> _obscure, receive no response that is not suffered  
>  as the days grow long and distortions_
> 
>  _come to seem the natural course of things—_  
>  -What Is (War), Joanna Klink

It hurts to be alive. 

Or, more accurately, it hurts* to be alive.** 

*A petty human concept born from the strange reality of muscles and flesh and reality and flesh and flesh and flesh and the laws of physics meeting biological organisms. The concept does not apply to her***, except when it does. Currently, she has a headache, in the same way she has a head: debatably, in flux, and all the more painful for it. 

**Can a thing which does not exist live?

***Michael was a he until it wasn't. Helen is a _she._ Helen is still herself. Helen has never been herself. The very concept of Helen Richardson, backwards and forwards in time, has been called into question, has been irrevocably damaged, the sanctity of her memory cracked right down the middle, and _despite_ that she is _still herself,_ and still _her_ self, and she does not know what to do with this. 

It is tiring and confusing. The emotional turmoil that dogs her steps and plagues her conscious* hours rivals her twisted hallways in scope and tangle. She-Is-Not-What-She-Is is not supposed to be any kind of a person. A person is not supposed to be uncountable kilometers of corridors which follow impossible paths. These two states of being are irreconcilable. 

  
*All of her hours are conscious these days. She does not sleep.

— 

Melanie is not an orderly thing, even here in the stronghold of It-Watches-You. She is not _dis_ organized, exactly; the papers on her desk are not spread every which way in dizzying not-patterns, the one sought for perpetually unseen until someone else turns up and points it out right in front of the searcher’s eyes, the way something which _may_ be named Helen privately thinks they should be, and yet, and yet—the hum and skirl of the Noisome Violence follows in her footsteps. She is not a soldier, one who _(/which?)_ can temper and tame the tuneful screaming under orders, but she holds it back nonetheless, doggedly, dagger-sharp words still _words_ and not the knife she carries with her, sharp as Helen’s fingers-teeth-hallways. She has not succumbed. 

Melanie is not an orderly thing, and in the wake of the attack she is kind to Helen. It shouldn’t make the difference that it does.

“Do you regret it,” she asks once, out of the blue, frowning down at a file folder with distaste and chewing on the end of a pen. There is no inflection in her voice. This does not make it any less of a question.

  
“Depends on what ‘it’ is,” Helen answers. It’s not as if she doesn’t know, but what she still identifies somehow as _subterfuge,_ a sly dance of words around the boundaries of a question—it comes easily to her, these days. (She tells herself she is still capable of directness and it rings like a promise she doesn’t want to look at, for fear of breaking, for fear of finding it broken.)

“This,” Melanie says, waving her hand and its half-empty coffee cup at the door without looking up. “Coming to the archives. Getting caught up in this whole mess in the first place.” 

A thing named Helen Richardson never knew how it felt to grow a thornbush in the cage of her ribs, but the sensation is curiously familiar.* For a moment the corridors are a forest of briars, weaving together in dizzying patterns. There are no roses in Melanie’s blunt tones, only a sharpness that traps and holds. Answering questions is hard, these days.

“People change,” she says, in lieu of a response. “Don’t think I’m missing much.” 

On cue, Melanie inhales her coffee and chokes, coughing. Flecks of saliva speckle her desk as she tries and fails to inhale properly. Her eyes widen in panic, her body shakes with the force of it. Helen moves to place her hand on Melanie’s back — for what reason, she can’t say — and then she gasps and the moment is gone, and her breaths whistle in and out as they should. 

“God,” says Melanie hoarsely, a curse ragged around the edges. “Forget I said anything.” 

Helen identifies the feeling under her palm as the warmth of a human body. Average, probably. She’s no idea how to tell. 

“I don’t sleep anymore,” she says, the words tumbling from her mouth even as she wonders at her own answer. 

“Bet you don’t get tired either,” Melanie sighs. 

“No,” Helen agrees, although privately she’s not sure. She pulls her hand away. Somewhere a briar bush turns a kaleidoscope of colors, witnessed by an astonished botanist. No one will ever believe him. 

Melanie yawns, turns back to her work, grumbles, says no more about regret. Later, she stands up in a huff, dons her coat, asks Helen if she’d like a drink. The sun rests near the horizon. The file folder is half-covered in absent-minded doodles, though its contents are unharmed. One of the doodles is a section of an infinite fractal. The work is no closer to completion than it was when Melanie sat down. 

Helen declines. Melanie leaves. Helen watches the clouds from the rooftop of the Institute until nightfall, and then watches the stars until the sun rises again.  
  
*Whatever she is now or was then, there will always be questions which hurt.  
  


— 

It’s easier than she expected, to satiate her hunger. 

She cannot be hidden from. There are no words for the senses she has now, vast and unfolding and spiraling through the edges of the world like a glitchy map. A scared old man calls to her, though he does not know it. He wanders through the lower floors of a tenement which he does not recognize, though he has spent much of his life here, and as he moves—terrified, searching and not finding, the vague sense of a thing that he has misplaced and the impossibility of losing a location filling his hazy mind with voiceless jangling alarm—the building becomes something which cannot exist, made of locked doors and hallways and right turns. 

She follows him, though she can feel his shambling progress without needing to see it, and peers around a corner. On the wall across from her is a mirror. It reflects her as something impossible, something ravenous and hunting, teeth and tendrils and vicious, distorted hands. The sharpness of their tips is threat and promise. She stares, caught off-guard, and the thing in the mirror looks back at her patiently. Her reflection does not move or breathe. She has no need for air, now. If the old man looked back he would see her resplendent in her inhumanity. 

The old man does not look back. He toils on, doggedly, sweating. The thrumming of his heart as heard by the walls reaches her ears as hymn and metronome. He does not need to see to be afraid.

She withdraws. The mirrors no longer reflect anything. He staggers on. When he falls he lays in a crumpled heap, insensate, trembling. She estimates it takes him another half a day to die. It is the easiest thing she has ever done, and his fear is indescribably satiating.

She cannot bear it.

—

  
“Get out,” the Archivist says, and she recognizes the emotion in his voice as fear in the way it calls to her, its coating of anger thin and flaky as the croissants a human called Helen Richardson* used to eat for breakfast, buttery and soft on her morning stomach.  
  
*She. She used to eat. It’s all relative, really. 

  
“Archivist—” 

“ _Get. Out._ ” 

“Fine,” she says, and leaves.  
The door closes behind her. The section of her which was the door, and also the section of her which was Helen, unobtrusively cease to intersect with physical reality in that location. 

It is, objectively, a ridiculous thing to do to sink down onto the floor and lean against a wall for support. It is all her. She is the walls which only ever make right turns and the mirrors which do not reflect and the paintings which are of the walls and the undulating carpet, soft and abrasive by turns, never seeming to settle on a hue but twisting through all of them in shades fit to burn the eyes of anyone looking—chartreuse, cyan blue, black as hollow as hunger. 

She sits on the floor anyway, and for reasons which do not quite make sense to her tries to approximate the human sense of touch, to feel the carpet and the wall supporting her facsimile of a body at an uncomfortable 92° angle. 

She’s not very good at it anymore, but it helps anyway.

  
He’d called her a liar, and he was right, but not in this _._ Mirrors and falsities she may be, the threads of her being twining into staircases to nowhere, constructions to drive Escher to insanity, but _she_ has _never_ lied to him. She _cannot,_ though this pains some part of her to say, and moreover she does not want to, she just—

All she wanted was to feel better. She just wants to feel better. 

Helen Richardson gave her statement to the Magnus Institute. Helen Richardson gave her statement to The Archivist, who listened to her, who believed her, and that made her feel better. It was easy for her. It should still be easy, she thinks, Helen thinks, Helen-which-is-not-what-she-is thinks to herself. 

She is the same person. She is not the same person. People change. Can anyone say differently? Can anyone wake up day after day and say they are the same person they were two days ago, three days, a week, a year? People change all the time. She has changed. A day ago she took an old man wandering, confused, and she reveled in his befuddlement, his dizzy, doddering fear, and she ate of it til he ceased to live. It was delicious. It was wrong. She has killed a person. She has never worried about killing people before. She was not ready to become Helen, or Helen was not ready to become her, but she _is_ Helen, from every reasonable point of view save the most important one, the one she wanted to see* her—

*He is so blind, still. 

The crux of the thing: she does not feel like she is wearing the skin of a person who used to exist. The crux of the thing: he looks at her with his piercing eyes and he sees a lie in the form of a person he knew, a lie which will endanger all he still cares for, a smiling hunger who cannot help. The crux of the thing: Jon will never, ever consider her worth reassurance again.

He didn’t know her, not really. Just talked to her once.

It’s not _fair.*_

_*_ Very few things are. The concept of _fairness_ is the scream of the human mind against the dark. It is not _real_ , not in a way that matters. 

_You would think,_ her own voice says to her, soft and untired as only a non-being could be, _that an unreal thing could let go of principles._

Not a bad idea, that.

—

The Archivist promised Jared a way out of her halls. Helen does not mind his departure overmuch — he has been an irritant, a foreign body, one which could not integrate and could not be killed. She suspects he will be a problem in the future, however, and she has not forgotten how he came to her. Setting him free smacks of undeserved mercy. 

She does not feel particularly merciful, as of late. She lets him go on her terms. 

_"Nice,"_ Melanie chuckles, and for a moment she feels almost a person again*, her far-off hallways echoing pleasantly with the distant splash of Jared hitting the river like—well, like a sack of bones and meat, arranged with an artist’s care but an amateur’s eye. The feeling strains at her in the manner of a muscle gone unworked, in the manner of a bow strung taut and humming.

Melanie has a nice laugh, even now, devoid of the echo of war-flutes.

The Archivist groans, and Helen’s attention is diverted. He is a strange creature, all too willing to hurt in pursuit of knowledge, face screwed up, whole body curled around the focal point of the shining white object in his grip as if seeking solace. 

Her own ribs might have ached in her chest, in sympathy, but she no longer has ribs, or a chest, or anything that is not an illusion of a body wrapped around carpet that has never been fabric and miles of subterranean tunnels echoing with mad laughter. She does not miss it. It did not properly feel like hers, at times. It is easier to say these things to herself now that she does not have much of a self. 

He is a strange creature, to cling to humanity, and so was she. Humanity never awarded them for their efforts.

He thanks her. In a corridor out of earshot a painting suddenly fizzes with carbonation, joy spilling over in the hiss and pop of bubbles arising out of wet paint. She tells him that she is happy to assist, and it is not a lie.  
  
*(She doesn’t, really, but—  
it feels better, now.)

**Author's Note:**

> this took me far too long to wrestle into the shape of a thing which was anywhere near done, and at the end of it i find myself regretting i can't seem to write more of it, but i'm very, very proud of what's here.   
> my thanks to dramatispersonae for writing Make Me Feel Like I'm Lost and whose Distortion characterization in no small part inspired mine, and nausicaaenriquez for writing a real good post about the main avatars' preferred breakfast foods, which i couldn't resist referencing. 
> 
> like it? hate it? want to print out one specific sentence and eat it? comments section below.


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